Metro Vancouver’s sushi explosion: 600 and counting (with video)

The final product. Miku executive chef Kazuhiro Hayashi prepares the restaurant’s signature dish. There are over 650 different Japanese restaurants in the Metro Vancouver.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Miku executive chef Kazuhiro Hayashi prepares the rice for his restaurant’s signature sushi dish. In Japan, a chef spends two years learning to make the rice properly before spending three years learning how to prepare fish.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Miku executive chef Kazuhiro Hayashi prepares the restaurant’s signature dish. Here he prepares the rice. In Japan, a chef spends two years learning to make the rice properly before spending three years learning how to prepare fish.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Miku executive chef Kazuhiro Hayashi prepares the restaurant’s signature dish. Here he applies a sauce. There are over 650 different Japanese restaurants in the Metro Vancouver.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

A quick searing of the raw fish with a blow torch, one of Miku’s signature touches. Miku executive chef Kazuhiro Hayashi prepares the restaurant’s signature dish. There are over 650 different Japanese restaurants in the Metro Vancouver.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Miku executive chef Kazuhiro Hayashi prepares the restaurant’s signature dish. There are over 650 different Japanese restaurants in the Metro Vancouver.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Miku executive chef Kazuhiro Hayashi prepares the restaurant’s signature dish. There are over 650 different Japanese restaurants in the Metro Vancouver. ,Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

VANCOUVER — The long knife flashes as Kuni Shimamura dissects prawns and scallops and effortlessly combines them with rice inside a shell of dark-green seaweed.

Washing his hands for the umpteenth time today, the veteran owner of Koko Japanese Restaurant on East Hastings Street passes the finished sushi across the lunch counter to one of his many loyal customers.

Shimamura says that when his father opened the restaurant in 1976, then named Koji’s, there were only three restaurants in the city that served sushi.

Now, there are more than 600 sushi outlets in Metro Vancouver. And that does not include sushi counters in supermarkets across the region.

Ian Tostenson, president of the B.C. Restaurant and Food Services Association, said that means sushi makes up almost 10 per cent of all Metro restaurants. He said “it’s hard to get good data” on the different genres of restaurants, but estimated sushi outlets in Metro probably still do not quite match the total number of coffee bars or pizza places.

Still, “sushi is what’s up and coming. It’s probably the restaurant sector that’s most surging now.”

Not solely Japanese

Most are not run by sushi chefs like Vancouver-born Shimamura, who carries on his father’s Japanese traditions of the fine art of preparing bite-sized pieces of raw fish and rice flavoured with sugar, salt and vinegar.

Sushi is becoming increasingly common in South Korea and China. And since only one per cent of Metro’s population has Japanese roots, restaurant industry specialists say most of the city’s sushi outlets are run by ethnic Koreans or Chinese, who make up 25 per cent of the population.

When Shimamura is asked if he thinks Metro has too many sushi outlets, he doesn’t have time to answer before sushi-counter customer Jason Chan, 30, declares: “There are too many. And only the good ones will stick around.”

Koko Japanese restaurant has been operating for more than three decades behind a nondescript entrance at 2053 East Hastings, inside of which is a long sushi bar, small tables and wood-framed booths in which customers remove their shoes to dine.

Most of the hundreds of sushi bars that have cropped up across Metro in the past decade, said Shimamura, 44, do not rigorously follow Japanese sushi custom.

Several customers at Koko’s swore by its quality. As they watched Shimamura dip into some smelt roe, they said they have been dining at the restaurant for decades while avoiding virtually all the new sushi places, many of which operate like fast-food outlets.

Kazuhiro Hayashi, executive chef at downtown Vancouver’s high-end Miku Waterfront restaurant, said sushi is more popular in Metro than anywhere else he knows outside of Japan.

The volume of sushi outlets here “sometimes freaks me out,” said Hayashi, 32, who trained for six years as a sushi chef in the city of Kyoto in his native Japan.

“Everybody finds sushi healthy, and the prices in this city are really competitive.”

To discover there are more than 600 sushi outlets in Metro Vancouver, Sun data journalist Chad Skelton searched for the words “sushi” or “Japanese” in Metro’s public-health-inspection restaurant reports. He then created an online map showing each sushi outlet location, with links to its health records.

(If you're on a mobile device, please click here to see the map.)The eruption of sushi outlets includes longstanding Koko’s, but it also takes in upmarket Japanese restaurants like Zest, Tojos, Miku and Minami, and hundreds of tiny neighbourhood sushi bars from trendy Yaletown to semi-rural Langley.

The downtown Vancouver peninsula has more than 80 sushi outlets of various kinds. Kitsilano has more than 30. Burnaby’s Metrotown neighbourhood alone has 13 sushi outlets. Richmond also has more than 30 sushi outlets, with most in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of ethnic Chinese residents. There are scores more sushi restaurants and bars in Coquitlam and Surrey.

With sushi mania taking over Metro Vancouver, it’s no coincidence one of the most popular blog postings by Sun restaurant reviewer Mia Stainsby is headlined: “Twenty-seven best Vancouver sushi restaurants.” It’s been visited more than 130,000 times.

“I’m not too surprised,” said Tostenson, “since everybody I know likes sushi, from my own kids to the people in this office (which is in Vancouver’s Fairview neighbourhood).”

All kinds of people find sushi “refreshing and healthy,” Tostenson said. A sushi meal, he said, is an engaging and social experience in which “you get to play with chopsticks.”

Customers from a range of ethnicities like the way sushi is often prepared in an open kitchen, Tostenson said. “And a lot of the sushi makers appear to not speak English well, which adds to the intrigue.”

Sushi has become ubiquitous in Metro Vancouver in part because 43 per cent of city residents have Asian origins, predominantly Chinese.

Tostenson’s son, Ryan, 23, a student living in China, texted him this week to say there has been a mushrooming of convenient, cheap sushi outlets in China’s cities, with most offering “all-you-can-eat” deals.

Sushi has a “crossover” appeal in East Asian regions such as Japan, China, Malaysia and Korea, Tostenson said, with their mutual emphasis on rice and certain sauces.

A cook who immigrates to Canada with experience in East Asia “does not have far to go,” Tostenson said, “to learn to prepare sushi.” It’s not as much a stretch, he said, as learning how to prepare quality Western cuisine.

Questions of quality

Leo Lee, the tattooed, ponytailed 46-year-old cook-owner of Green Leaf Sushi on Broadway, said he was working in a Western-food restaurant in Saskatchewan before he moved a few years ago to Vancouver to start his own sushi bar.

Raised in Korea, where he says sushi is becoming common, Lee said his sushi clientele is equally divided between whites and Asians. They find sushi “not heavy,” Lee said, and “a little bit cheap.”

As they enjoyed large plates of sushi at lunch hour, Green Leaf patrons Philip Eng and James Poon said they constantly scout the scores of sushi bars on the west side of Vancouver for the best ones.

“I think everyone likes sushi,” said Eng, who was born in East Vancouver. “When I was growing up, I didn’t like the thought of eating raw fish. But now I love it, partly because you don’t get stuffed.”

Poon, raised in Hong Kong, said he appreciates sushi because it’s “not greasy,” which he says is a problem with a lot of Chinese food.

Despite the popularity of sushi restaurants, Trevor Corson, author of The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice, is not alone in worrying most North American sushi outlets do not adhere to the level of quality found in Japan.

In Japan, Corson says, an apprentice sushi chef spends two years learning to cook and season rice, and another three years learning to prepare fish, before he is allowed to work behind the sushi bar. In North America, Corson said high demand for sushi makers means that many work behind the bar after only a few months of training.

With so many sushi outlets in the city employing thousands of staff and serving hundreds of thousands of customers, The Sun’s Stainsby said: “There’s too many mediocre sushi places pumping them out like burgers.”

One regular customer at Koko’s, Dick Chang, 33, who has been visiting the restaurant since he was a child, maintained most sushi outlets in the city don’t have highly trained chefs and serve overly-large chunks of low-grade fish.

Another faithful Koko diner, Tom Farrell, whose extended family works in the fishing industry, said many sushi outlets across Metro do not take care to ensure they serve “fresh, superior” seafood, especially crab and tuna.

When the owner of Koko’s was asked why so many non-Japanese people open sushi outlets in Metro, Shimamura answered with a smile: “I guess they think it’s a quick buck. But if it was, I would have retired a long time ago.” He said he works about 12 hours a day seven days each week.

The restaurant association’s Tostenson agreed that opening a sushi outlet in Metro is not an easy way to make a living. “The restaurant business is very hard. If someone opens a sushi place, they’re going to work long hours and need a lot of pride and passion.”

How sushi conquered

Sushi is more popular on the West Coast than the East Coast of North America, Tostenson said. Toronto, for instance, does not have nearly the number of sushi outlets per capita as Metro Vancouver.

Tostenson believes, however, that sushi outlets may be nearly as common in San Francisco and Los Angeles as they are in Metro Vancouver.

Some food magazines have suggested Greater Los Angeles is the sushi capital of the U.S. They have reported more than 300 sushi outlets in that city of 18 million people. One of its contributions to evolving sushi tradition is the California Roll, with crabmeat and avocado.

But Metro Vancouver now appears to have more sushi outlets than Los Angeles, despite only one-ninth of the population. And Canada’s West Coast has also contributed the B.C. Roll to sushi cuisine; with barbecued salmon (including the skin) and cucumber.

Kazuhiro, head chef at Miku Waterfront, said sushi’s ubiquity can partly be explained by the way sushi makers slowly persuaded North Americans to overcome their worries about eating raw fish or seaweed.

For instance, so-called “inside-out rolls” — which hide the seaweed on the inside of sushi — were invented in North America, Kazuhiro said. Because of such methods, Kazuhiro said, North Americans were turned onto sushi “step by step.”

Sushi innovation continues today, including with the “fusion” of Eastern and Western styles and novel techniques. One trademark at the Miku and Minami restaurants, for instance, is sushi that has been seared with a blowtorch.

Another resistance North Americans have had to overcome about sushi is health concerns about uncooked fish.

But Koko’s Shimamura says the problem of bacteria in fish, at least in most sushi restaurants in Canada, has been solved by new flash-freezing methods and the cleanliness linked to rigorous health inspections.

Yet, while North Americans assume sushi is super-healthy, the author of The Story of Sushi says most sushi rolls served on this continent have a fair amount of carbohydrates, sugar, fat, and sodium. It’s part of the reason Shimamura believes more customers are choosing vegetarian sushi.

One big issue that remains largely unresolved about the sushi explosion is ecological.

Corson says most North American sushi chefs — despite preparing vast quantities of tuna, salmon, shrimp, eel, and other creatures from the sea — have not addressed issues of environmental sustainability and the damaging of ocean ecosystems.

Shimamura is one sushi chef who appeared unperturbed by ecological questions. There is virtually no kind of seafood he does not serve. Asked about sustainability, he said the main thing he goes by in choosing different fish varieties is price, which varies dramatically based on availability.

Regardless of any concerns about health, sustainability or the financial viability of the sushi business, infatuation with the bits of vinegar-flavoured rice and seafood does not seem to be going away.

Tostenson, who has a Norwegian background, says sushi is far more popular on the West Coast of North America than in Europe, largely because residents of countries such as Italy, France and Germany “are pretty invested in their cuisines.”

In contrast, the Asian-influenced West Coast doesn’t have a dominant cuisine. “We take food types from all over the world. When I look at Metro Vancouver, the food really is international and comes in a wide range of prices — and sushi is an important part of the scene.”

dtodd@vancouversun.comBlog: www.vancouversun.com/thesearch

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Share

Metro Vancouver’s sushi explosion: 600 and counting (with video)

Video

Today's Headline Videos

Best of Postmedia

To steel himself for the year-long journey that began Wednesday, Jonathan Pitre has been going over the hard calculus that underpins his decision to pursue a high-risk, high-reward treatment in Minnesota

When he woke up in tears the morning after he had cried himself to sleep, Rohit Saxena knew what he had to do. Leaving his wife, Lesley, asleep in bed, Rohit went downstairs, opened his laptop and began to write. “They say your kids are your hearts outside your body,” he wrote. “I’ll always be […]

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.